Friday: Hili dialogue

We’ve again reached the end of another week: it’s Friday, June 22, 2018, the second day of summer. Now the days will slowly begin getting shorter. It’s National Chocolate Eclair Day, and not much else.

On the duck front, it’s been raining continuously here, impeding my ability to get photos. The duck islands are now covered with water, as the drainage system of the pond, which keeps the water level constant, can’t keep up with the rain. The brood has thus been hanging out on the shallow edges of the pond or in the reeds. I don’t like this, as it makes them vulnerable to predators. However, there are still eight ravenous ducklings, and the rain should stop sometime today, giving us a sunny and dry weekend. In the meantime, I get drenched several times a day doing the feedings, as it’s impossible to feed ducks, which requires two hands, and hold an umbrella at the same time. So it goes.

Not much happened in this day in history. On June 22, 1633, the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the center of the Universe. But of course all soft-on-religion scholars of science will argue that this was not a clash between faith and science: it was something else, like a battle of personalities (read Ronald Numbers if you want to see this brand of weaselly historical apologetics). On this day in 1942, the U.S. Congress adopted the Pledge of Allegiance; this is its present form:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The words “under God,” to which all rational secularists object, were added in 1954 in a bill signed by President Eisenhower. This is what Ike said:

From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty…. In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.

Finally, it was on this day in 1986, during the World Cup in Mexico, that Diego Maradona helped lead Argentina to victory over England (2-1) by scoring two goals (Argentina went on to win the World Cup). One, the “hand of God” goal, was clearly a handball and should have been disallowed. The other, a marvel of dribbling, is often regarded as the greatest goal of all time. Here again are both:

Notables born on June 22 include chess champion Paul Morphy (1837), Julian Huxley (1887), John Dillinger (1903), Billy Wilder (1906), Meryl Streep (1949; the year I was born: I judge how well I’m aging by looking at her. She looks great but I think this comparison is irrational), and Cyndi Lauper (1953).

Also born on this day was Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), a well known science fiction writer, though not known to me. Google has celebrated her birth with a Doodle:

Notables who died on this day include poet Walter de la Mare (1956), David O. Selznick (1965), Judy Garland (1969), Fred Astaire (1987), Dennis Day (1988), Pat Nixon (1993), and George Carlin (2008). On the anniversary of George Carlin’s death, here’s his famous riff on religion:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili dialogue is again a bit enigamtic, so I asked Malgorzata to explain: “Isn’t there a saying in English “Silence before storm”? There is one in Polish. So that’s what Hili is talking about: it’s eery quiet and she is afraid that this may suddenly end.”

Hili: Unsettling silence.

A: Why?

Hili: Because something may go boom.

In Polish:

Hili: Niepokojąca cisza.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo coś może huknąć.

Some tweets from Matthew: including this lovely fossil of a swift:

It’s #SwiftAwarenessWeek! I currently work on the evolution of swifts and their kin, so I should tweet something. Among modern birds, the swift lineage is an ancient one. Here is the 48-million-year old swift Scaniacypselus from Germany. (📷Robert Clark) pic.twitter.com/Q0q5wGHxOv

Here’s Matthew exactly sharing my sentiments about the power of selection. He even gets a bit Hallelujah-ish at the end!

Just think of the slow, sifting power of natural selection, gradually creating thise eye-spots, down to the white scales that look like reflections. Each form, from the simplest blob to this glorious precision, giving its possessor a slight advantage. Praise Darwin! (And Wallace) https://t.co/CyjNKEa4lA

One of the extraordinary attributes of functional neuroimaging is that, if it is applied in just the right way to a question of great interest, it can manage to shed no light on it whatsoeverhttps://t.co/Nkv4WxMx2d

Buster is to trains as, well, uh … I have no idea how to fill out this proportion. There is nothing quite like Buster and trains. “The General,” of course. But I especially recommend the last few minutes of “One Week.”

Mr. Numbers,
“clash between faith and science:” and “battle of personalities” are not mutually exclusive, any more than clash of ideologies and battle or personalities are mutually exclusive in the Clinton vs. Trump race.

The church of that day was deeply entrenched in the neo-Platonic “Great Chain of Being” cosmology and Aristotelian physics and Galileo threatened that.

The Galileo affair is partly offset by Isaac Newton who was not only religious but religiously motivated to work out his theory of gravitation, as he was understanding the divine creation. But Newton had his religious resisters as well.

Numbers is an agnostic son of a fundamentalist family. His history of creationism is supposed to be fairly good.

The Galileo affair is tangentially mentioned in C.S. Lewis’ “English Literature in the 17th Century Excluding Drama” and he more or less admits a real church-science conflict.

I think Galileo’s well-publicised stoush with the Pope tends to make people over-rate his importance in comparison with other astronomers of the period, and also to concentrate on the heliocentric theory to the exclusion of his other achievements.

It would seem that his enthusiasm led him to ignore obvious problems with his celestial theories. For example, Copernicus’ heliocentric theory suffered from the fact that the presumed circular orbits didn’t predict the planetary motions any better than the complicated old Ptolemaic system did.
Kepler eventually worked out the correct theory (elliptical orbits) but Galileo ignored it.

Galileo also claimed that the Sun caused the tides (which is obviously incorrect if you consider that the tides change by ~45 minutes a day) – another thing Kepler got right (in believing the Moon caused them).

His contributions to mechanics on the other hand are very considerable. He was better at terrestrial mechanics than celestial ones.

True, re: celestial mechanics. But also true that he was a more sober scientist in spite of not seeing what Kepler had done. Part of that is likely Kepler’s own fault, I *think*. I cannot tell if Galileo was sent Kepler’s stuff that we read now: it is full of *other* numerological and Pythogorean bullcrap that is not well argued for, never mind true.

Yesterday was a sad day – like Argentinians, we there here discovered our god had feet of clay. 😦

I share Hili’s unease. I’ve learned not to trust the lull and camaraderie when epic sports events are taking place, such as the winter and summer Olympics, and now World Cup soccer hosted by Russia. I suspect they’ll be up to more shenanigans really soon.